Home-O P1
M: I need more than a place to crash, to keep some stuff, to stay dry, warm & fed. I need a place where I can be absolutely alone. Unwatched as I unwind and reconstruct myself. I need a place where I can synthesize what I absorb from the outside world, sorting through what parts I want to hold onto, while discarding the refuse.
I need a place where I can see myself reflected on the walls, as an encasement of who I am, what I believe in and where I’ve come from. In a world of unpredictability, I need the predictability of my personal puzzle; the organized material that codes my memory and sense of self.
I need a place where the chaos in my brain and the panic in my heart can be stabilized, counter-balanced with creative order; primary perks and plush downers. I need a slate that’s clean (cleaner than I can keep it) and somehow feels like me, while ripe with possibility for a new self.
G and I are trying to make a home together.
We’ve been trying to do this for six years, and are still figuring it out. We joke that we’re fascist domestic gays, unfit for roommate status with anyone beyond ourselves (someday, we’ll be found in a pool of our blood, having massacred each other over the positioning of a wall hanging). Needless to say, the stereotype is somewhat true; of being the anal-retentive, controlling, gay roommates, we are not immune. But it undersells the reality of our feelings a little bit. Or, at least, of mine.
I’ll speak only for myself here–
Growing up closeted involved a lot of anxiety. I was hyper self-aware, perpetually worried about letting queerness leak through in an inflection, reaction or admiration. Even before I knew what my queerness was, the sense of being watched and evaluated, including by my self, created the desire for invisibility or at least, to have parts of myself disguised. This led to a dual experience of my identity: first, it made me require absolute personal space, where I could be totally alone and completely in control, in order to feel comfortable. Second, it created the feeling of not existing in public. I was instrumental in trying to erase parts of my personality and there came periods where that erasure felt successful; where I felt unseen, like an amorphous persona drifting the halls of my high-school, too vague an outline to be picked on.
I started getting good at looking outward to learn how to be–how to behave for maximum benefit and minimum exposure. And so, my self became composed of a series of choices, rather than reactions to inner desire. Eventually, though, my queerness corroded my encasement and I came out. After that, for a while, my identity shifted to one of rebellion, where every action taken felt oppositional, which was empowering but also isolating in new ways.
Were I better at concealing my true self, I might be profoundly lost today. I still meet men who are only just coming to terms with their sexuality in their thirties, having successfully hid a big part of themselves for decades. While I came out much earlier, I held onto a piece of my disguise that I still wear. It’s the veil I pull down every time G should naturally come up in conversation and instead, I choose to speak as though I live alone. It’s the desire I have after work many days to run home and lock myself in my sanctuary, or go to the woods, when others might be going out to hang with friends. I long for more sociality but crave my social deprivation chamber; my home that I build with an imagination of having others integrated with it.
When I travel alone, I leave all this behind me. I go into the world, in search of new ways of thinking, seeing and being with others and myself. But before long, I yearn to come home, bringing with me a slightly different version of me to wrestle with. For at home, like a house of mirrors, I see myself reflected on the walls, for better or worse. I face these images of myself, by myself, where I can come apart and reconstruct, fight with the house and honour the pieces I like. Most of all, I can be bizarre. I can do things that, frankly probably aren’t very strange at all, but to me–a man who still senses the outside gaze of his gayness every time he waters his plants–feel highly revealing.
